Dawn McCrary was a 24-year-old Black woman from Camden, New Jersey, who was found dead on December 1, 1997. The cause of death was strangulation, a violent and intimate method that suggested close contact with her attacker. Initially her killing was one of many homicides in a city already contending with high violence levels.

Investigators later linked her death to James D. Gunning, a 1971-born man who had been adopted as a baby and raised in suburban Philadelphia. Gunning came under scrutiny after a May 1999 incident in Hamilton Township in which a woman escaped a vehicle with fresh rope marks on her neck; officers found Gunning in the car and he admitted placing a rope around her neck. That case, once entered into a violent-crime analysis system, prompted detectives in multiple jurisdictions to compare unsolved strangulations and assaults. Reviews and evidence identified Gunning as responsible for McCrary’s killing, and he was convicted of aggravated manslaughter in her death and given a sentence with a maximum term of 17 years, including a mandatory portion of 14 years, 5 months, and 14 days.

Her case became part of a broader pattern investigators associated with a man who used strangulation after sexual encounters; questions remain about whether other women were murdered by the same person. Did anyone who knew Dawn or who spent time in Camden in late 1997 see anything that might still help explain what happened to her?